Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come. Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain’s lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress. — from “Autumn Song,” by W. H. Auden So much…
Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was published in 1964 as fiction, but in fact described the author’s own teenage struggle for sanity and the help she received from Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, herself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Dr. Fromm-Reichmann had strong theories about the practice of…
The Fourth Wall. Playwright A.R. Gurney is angry. He considers the Bush administration a disaster; he condemns its boneheaded policies, its indifference to the plight of the poor, its pre-emptive war on Iraq. But Gurney is a kind-spirited, bourgeois, WASP kind of guy, and in this play, his anger is…
The Grudge bears the imprimatur of Sam Raimi, but, alas, neither his sense of fun nor his smarts. The wunderkind director behind the Spider-Man and Evil Dead franchises has followed in the path of Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment releases, launching his own lucrative spook factory, Ghost…
Let’s just get the term out of the way up front: It’s “fag hag” — and a thousand pardons, sensitive readers, but there is no PC equivalent. The new film Stage Beauty is an absolute fag-hag fiesta. Beneath its historical leanings and classic veneer, it’s utterly gaga for girls who…
In the mood for a double dose of low-camp spine-tingle? The Denver Art Museum’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater series will unspool an unashamedly low-budget, high-entertainment-value double feature early next week, just in time for Halloween. British director Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face (1958) has a suitably ghoulish title, for…
Last month, former grunge god Billy Corgan made his live debut as a would-be literary giant, reading poems from his recently published first volume of verse, Blinking With Fists, at the prestigious Poetry Center of Chicago. Tickets for the event were $35 each. Among the pieces Corgan performed was his…
Thursday, October 21 Only the most elegant and literate of ghouls will be present at this year’s Victorian Horrors event hosted by the Molly Brown House Museum, 1340 Pennsylvania Street, when the lights are lowered and the candles lit for a storytelling journey up creaky staircases and through cobweb-decorated rooms…
Fifteen years into his standup comedy career, Mitch Hedberg is experiencing a span of pseudo-fame that rock bands who make it big must pine for: enjoying full venues and critical acclaim, but without the burden of MTV stardom; being adored by hipsters at the record store, but going unrecognized on…
I have never donated my bra to anything. Not even to the Village Idiot, my friends’ New York honky-tonk with a time-honored tradition of demanding bras in exchange for the honor of dancing on the bar. And I danced on that bar a lot. I saw no reason to part…
SAT, 10/23 In 1987, only 248 mountain gorillas remained in the wild, in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Subject to decades of civil war in the regions they inhabited, as well as the spread of dangerous diseases, poaching and the devastating consequences of increased habitat loss, the…
FRI, 10/22 Alternative activities such as ultra-running, ultimate Frisbee and high-endurance yoga have always found an enthusiastic home in Boulder. But extreme filmmaking? Fast forward to the Shoot Out 24 Hour Filmmaking Festival. No, it’s not a scheme to market a new lifestyle drink — although participants in the fast-and-furious…
>My first time with Bob Dylan was a million years ago in my brother Mark’s room. There, Mark kept a bare-tubed amp and stereo that he cherished fiercely, and he’d sometimes allow me to come in for listening sessions — indoctrinations, really — that covered the gamut of what was…
Photography includes so many different things, it’s head-spinning. There are all the various styles, plus a wide array of categories, including, of course, fine-art photography. But over the past couple of decades, it’s become all but impossible to separate fashion photography, commercial photography, documentary photography — and especially photojournalism –…
In the space once occupied by the now-gone and nearly forgotten ILK co-op, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, who was once that group’s director, has opened her own art business, Pod & Capsule (554 Santa Fe Drive, 303-623-3460). Pod is a funky boutique that offers affordable artist-made objects, while Capsule is a…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited by…
Donovan Marley has been the artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company for twenty years, but this season — which just opened with John Patrick Shanley’s Dirty Story — is the last under his leadership. When he announced his pending departure last year, a seismic shiver went through the…
The parking lot is full, and cars line the curb on both sides of the street. Inside, people throng the lobby. A couple is being turned away at the front desk: “I’m sorry. We’re all sold out.” When I first visited this place a few years ago, there were seven…
Anything Goes. When the work of a knowing sophisticate like Cole Porter is staged at an old-fashioned venue like this, what it loses in nuance, it gains in good nature and high-octane — if sometimes mindless — energy. Not that there’s much nuance to Anything Goes. The show is a…
Don’t expect Trey Parker and Matt Stone to come at you with little scalpels. Or clever bons mots. The creators of South Park go in for brute, double-barreled-shotgun satire, and anyone who doesn’t feel like being blasted should probably get out of the country — or off the planet. In…
The Czech drama Zelary brings to mind Bertolt Brecht’s pointed observation, “War is like love; it always finds a way.” In this instance, war creates the atmosphere in which an unlikely love flourishes, then overwhelms that love. Only a fool would try to improve on Brecht, but after absorbing Ondrej…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I ♥ Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy, in which…
